For most of their lives, senior editor Joe Nick Patoski and freelance
photographer Laurence Parent have explored and chronicled the mountains
of the Trans-Pecos. In this excerpt from their forthcoming book, Texas
Mountains, they show and tell where their love of the outdoors is
at its peak.

I GOT HOOKED ON THE TEXAS MOUNTAINS at the age of six, when I climbed
to the top of a small hill adjacent to the Chisos Basin lodge in Big Bend
National Park, rode on horseback to the Window, and peered over what seemed
then to be the edge of the world. I became fixated on the idea that there
was actually a place called the Christmas Mountains; it was visible through
the Window's massive slickrock aperture, beyond the park's northwestern
border.

The relationship continued through my youth, when I discovered that there
wasn't a more enchanting city view in Texas than the twinkling lights
of El Paso and Juárez at night, seen from Scenic Drive on Mount Franklin.
I climbed the pilgrims' path to the top of Mount Christo del Rey and straddled
the line between Texas, New Mexico, and Chihuahua. As an adult, I've touched
the roof of Texas atop Guadalupe Peak, perched on the edge of the South
Rim of the Chisos in Big Bend on a brilliantly clear day when objects
two hundred miles distant were visiblethe biggest view in the whole
worldand watched a comet from the top of Mount Locke at McDonald
Observatory, illuminated by more stars than the eye can comprehend in
the darkest skies in America.

These mountains are located in the Trans-Pecos part of Texas, which stretches
for some 250 miles east to west and extends about 200 miles north to southabout
the size of South Carolina. It is the most sparsely populated part of
the state. Save for the city of El Paso, where more than half a million
people live, no more than 30,000 residents live here. "Wide-open spaces"
is not just some catchphrase in this part of the state. They really do
exist. Within the boundaries of the Trans-Pecos sprawl the thirty-odd
named ranges of Texas. The Trans-Pecos is a region so expansive that several
of its counties are bigger than entire states. This is the Texas of dreams.

The easternmost ranges, the Housetops and Spencers, flank U.S. 90 twenty
miles east of Marathon like two sentinels. The Glass Mountains, the first
range of significant height and breadth, swell up more than a mile above
sea level between Marathon, Fort Stockton, and Alpine. From there all
the way to the state and the international boundaries to the northwest,
west, and southwest, mountains dominate the landscape. Some consider the
Texas mountains to be the southern extension of the Rocky Mountains, tumbling
out of Colorado and New Mexico. But only the Davis Mountains, the wettest
and one of the highest ranges in the state, and the Guadalupes, the highest
range of all, with the four tallest peaks in Texas, really resemble their
Colorado neighbors.

These are not easy mountains to love. They lack the altitude and drama
of either the Sierra Nevadas or the Rockies. The tallest mountain in Texas,
the 8,751-foot Guadalupe Peak, would hardly rate a glance on the other
side of the New Mexico line. They are located in one of the least accessible
places in the continental United States, far from most population centers.
As a result, few people even know they are here. Even though Interstate
10 cuts through several ranges, most travelers keep their eyes glued to
the road and have no idea what they're passing through. The two most impressive
ranges in the state, the Guadalupes and the Chisos, are protected as national
parks, but most of the other ranges in the Trans-Pecos and the Big Bend
remain unknown and unseen because they're off-limits. Unlike other western
states, where federal lands sometimes comprise more than half of a given
state's land area, Texas is mostly private property, mountains included.

This is a harsh country. Annual rainfall averages barely ten inches a
year, and a severe drought persisted for almost a decade at the close
of the twentieth century. Each of the four seasons has its own hellish
peculiarity. The blistering winds of early spring are brutal. An ovenlike
heat can set in as early as March. The soothing midsummer monsoons of
July, August, and September, which can green up the countryside overnight,
can bring killer floods with them too.

When the monsoons don't comewhich happens more and more frequently
these daysthe furnace effect down on the desert floor of the Big
Bend becomes so severe that every living thing, it seems, either burns,
dies, or withers away. But even when that kind of heat is on, up on the
Marfa Highlands or in the Davises and the Guadalupes, in August it's chilly
enough at night to sleep with a blanket. The coolest summer nights in
Texas are in the Texas mountains. Starting in mid-November, blue northers
blast in the bitterest cold, dropping temperatures as much as fifty degrees
in as little as an hour and occasionally leaving a dusting of snow on
the mountaintops, stirring visions of the Rockies or the Alps if only
for a day or two. Yet the same season can also bring temperatures above
100 degrees to the lower desert.

For the people who love these mountains, such realities are really blessings
that have kept away the crowds. After all, who wants to share the stands
of quaking aspen found in the Davis range, the maples of the Guadalupes
and the Sierra Vieja, and the small slivers of greened-up high country
that flourish on the mountaintops and in crevices and crannies, far from
public view? If you're blowing through at 70 miles per hour on the interstate
or peering out the window of a jet plane at 30,000 feet, you won't get
it. Those of us who do get it like that just fine. We know, as I have
learned, that there is much more than meets the eye. These mountains just
require a little more patience and a whole lot more effort.

Many of the Texas rangesthe Guadalupes, the Delawares, the Huecos,
and the Franklinsare largely devoid of vegetative cover because
of a dearth of moisture. Because they are so naked, they expose thousands
and millions of years in their layers and folds and are a playground for
geologists. Within the Texas mountains are geological features and formations
found nowhere else on the planet: a stone freak show of weird globs, jagged
spires, gravity-defying balancing acts, marbled swirls, scoops of melted
ice cream, and dribbled sand castles that wildly vary from extraterrestrial
to lunar in appearance. In spite of their apparent desolation, the mountains
harbor a huge variety of plant and animal species. The area is part of
the Chihuahuan Desert, the largest and highest desert in North America.
Here life flourishes in surprising places: on a remote cloud-catching
ridgeline or under a rare canopy of shade in hidden canyons fed by springs
and waterfalls.

Even though they are not the highest mountains around, these ranges offer
some of the most striking panoramas anywhere. Range after range fades
to the vanishing point, each separated from the next by vast desert floors
that go on forever. From the top of Mount Livermore in the Davis Mountains,
the highest peak in the second-highest range in Texas, mountain landmarks
are clearly visible in every direction: the rectangular hump of Chinati
Peak to the south; the long ridgeline of the Sierra Viejas bulging out
of the flats to the south and toward the west, fading into the Van Horns,
the Apaches, the Eagles, the Beaches, the Baylors, and the Sierra Diablos.
Beyond them all is the lone sentinel of Sierra Blanca, marking the route
to El Paso and the Pacific.

The last time I was in the Chisos Basin, I noticed that little hill by
the lodge again. Forty-three years had passed since I first scaled it.
For much of that time, the little hill didn't seem that big. It was but
another example of how things shrink and diminish when you grow up. Lately
though, it has started looking more like a mountain to me again, just
like it did when I was a kid. Just like it does to kids scurrying up its
rocks today, I'll bet.